Zero Knowledge: 116 Chapters In

The plate for Chapter 82, in the pop art style. That’s Samantha and Cooper, running up the road below the cabin. Yesterday Phin and I finished chapter 82 of Zero Knowledge. Counting the chapters I’ve inserted along the way, that’s 116 chapters of the shitty first draft, with 21 to go. The last time I wrote about this here was twenty chapters in, back in July. A lot has changed since then, so I thought I’d do a full update. If you’re new to this, Zero Knowledge is a near-term sci-fi quantum-crypto-thriller. Three twenty-something MIT grads run a quantum startup called Basalt Labs in Basalt, Colorado. Samantha, the CTO, writes an algorithm that breaks classical cryptography - RSA, elliptic curves, and every public-key lock the financial system runs on. Marcus is the CEO and the face of the company. Vlad is the third founder, and he’s purposefully a ghost. As a result of sloppiness on Marcus’s part, Bitcoin dies. Every secret anyone ever encrypted becomes readable. The post-quantum…